I worked at several startups that used a simple Kanban board - no standups, no ticket sizing, no sprints, no nothing - just a simple list of tasks and their sta

I worked at several startups that used a simple Kanban board - no standups, no ticket sizing, no sprints, no nothing - just a simple list of tasks and their status. All of them ended up adopting Scrum at some point, and all of them ended up less efficient, with developers wasting time with useless standup meetings, bikeshedding over ticket sizes, and wasting time breaking down a ticket into a dozen smaller tickets. This never made sense to me. It was obviously an inferior system, so why did they want us to adopt it? Until I suddenly realized that the advantage of Scrum is not to make developers move faster, but to minimize distrust. Without Scrum you may have deveopers moving faster, but you may also have developers slacking and taking too long to complete simple tasks. With Scrum, management at least has the illusion that this cannot happen by forcing you to fulfill a preallocated amount of work every sprint. Nowadays I see the rigidity of their Scrum process as a measurement of how much management trusts their developers, and how much they are willing to slow down their developers in order to trust that they are actually working.